Frieda Diekhoff Attwood – The Lloyd C Douglas Page

Is Christianity Opposed to the Theory of Evolution?

On October 19, 1919, Lloyd C. Douglas was speaking at the First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor on the subject of “The Conservation of Moral Leadership,” and for a brief moment in that sermon he touched on the question, “Is Christianity Opposed to the Theory of Evolution?”

(This sermon is filed under Sermons [4], Box 3, Lloyd C. Douglas Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. © University of Michigan.)

Lloyd Douglas was never one to shy away from controversial topics if he felt they needed to be addressed. He wouldn’t argue with people, but he would state his opinion boldly.

In this sermon, Douglas says, “Christian philosophy – if we may deal with its elemental propositions – makes no effort to account for the exact process by which mankind came into existence. The old Hebrew religion, out of which Christianity emerged under the leadership of the young Jewish Nazarene, did account for the creation of man on the ground of a miracle. There was a collection of these creation legends which were pieced together and assumed a fairly definitive narrative, with only minor discrepancies. Jesus knew this Hebrew creation story, for it was taught Him as a child. It was presented to Him as a fundamental doctrine which, to disbelieve, made one an infidel.

“If Jesus believed it at all, He did not consider it an important matter. If He had considered it important, He would have said so. The only fact about man’s creation worth noting was the fact that he had been created, undeniably for a high purpose. Nothing else about his creation mattered.

“Whether God is to bring the human race up, through ages of discipline, by a process of patient evolution or is to create him as he is now, by divine fiat, is a non-essential.

“The ancients who tried to explain the process were doubtless seeking an easy way for God to do it – the way they might have attempted to do it, had they been God.

“The indisputable fact is that nobody knows, or has ever known, the process by which God dignified one genus of the animal order to the point of endowing it with spiritual gifts and graces. It is a practically sure venture that the early Hebrews did not know, who believed the earth to be the center of the universe, around which the sun revolved.”

Although Douglas was a Christian minister, he did not think it was necessary to defend the Old Testament or even to believe in its teachings. He didn’t even think it was necessary to believe everything in the New Testament. He considered the Bible a library of books in which the writers did their best to make sense out of life and grappled especially with the idea of God and their relationship to God. For Douglas, to follow Jesus meant to do the things Jesus taught. In that sense, he was a minimalist: nothing else in the Bible mattered as much as the things Jesus said.

To be a Christ-follower, in Douglas’s opinion, did not require a person to believe that God made the sun stand still at Joshua’s command, nor did it require him to believe that the earth and its inhabitants were created just as described in the first two chapters of Genesis. He thought Christians should not tell scientists how to do their job, for there was nothing in the teachings of Jesus that disagreed with the theory of evolution. Douglas recognized no fundamental difference between the teachings of Jesus and the theory of evolution, despite the fact that there were plenty of Christian ministers saying otherwise.

Words Aren’t Equal to the Task

by Ronald R Johnson

A Lake Michigan sunrise, September 16, 2023.

“…it is a pretty clear case that God is somewhat out of the reach of our little vocabularies.”

These are the words of Lloyd C. Douglas, from a sermon entitled, “The Conservation of Moral Leadership,” which he preached at the First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor on Sunday, October 19, 1919. (The sermon is filed under Sermons [4], Box 3, Lloyd C. Douglas Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. © University of Michigan.)

Of course, we don’t have any other way of talking about God other than by using words; but Douglas was pointing out the error of confusing our verbal descriptions with The Thing Itself.

For example: “…the phrase ‘a personal God’ has been an unhappy combination of words in the mouths of people who couldn’t conceive of a person without instantly ascribing to that person such qualities as pertain to human personality. Thus the opinion found its origin that God is a tremendously great and powerful man-type.

“The authors of our most noted church confessions indulged themselves in the use of alarmingly big words which purported to magnify, but in reality only restricted and minimized, the Being they intended to laud. The more they defined Him, the more they sheared Him of power. Every time a new crop of dogmatists tried their hands at informing the world all about God, He lost ground in the opinion of people who didn’t want to trust to any superman, however super, to direct the affairs of the universe.”

But it was not so of Jesus, Douglas says. “There is a noticeable absence of ponderous phraseology in the Author of Christianity’s statements about God. To the mind of the Galilean, God was not to be encompassed by learned dissertations, but was only to be accepted as a fact, just as little children accept a fact which they do not comprehend. Of just one quality of God was Jesus sure. God was the Father of all men. He had not created the human race to serve a whim. And, as the Father of the race, He surely had not engendered it to hate it or neglect it, but to love and preserve it. This was a simple deduction, simply phrased. The dogmatists who have tried to improve upon it have failed.

“‘God is a Spirit,’ said Jesus. ‘They that worship Him, must worship Him in spirit’….

“Mankind is… a spiritual being, instinctively trying to relate his life to an intelligence beyond and without the province of temporal things. Christian philosophy simply falls back upon the childlike belief that God is the Father of us all…”

This view would lead Douglas throughout his life to minimize the importance of religious creeds. As he saw it, the task wasn’t to try to understand or explain God; it was to make contact with God. And for that reason, he also thought that Christians shouldn’t meddle in scientific explanations of the natural world and how it came to be. I’ll tell you more about that in my next post.

The Religion of a Collegian, Part 1

by Ronald R Johnson

The title page of “The Religion of a Collegian,” Sermons [4], Box 3, Lloyd C. Douglas Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. Copyright University of Michigan.

Over the next few posts, I will be sharing a sermon preached by Lloyd C. Douglas at the First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor on October 12, 1919, entitled, “The Religion of a Collegian.”

It is the beginning of the 1919-1920 school year at the University of Michigan. After talking briefly about higher education and its goals, Douglas sets out to answer the question, “What manner of religion, then, may expect to find favor and acceptance with the average normal type of collegian mind?” His short answer is: a religion in which “the real elements of Christianity, as taught and exemplified by the matchless Teacher of Nazareth in Galilee shall be revivified and energized in modern life.” In other words, a religion based on the teachings of Jesus and applied to daily life in the twentieth century.

To summarize: He starts out, however, with the claim that religion in general is an important part of the cultural bequest that students should grapple with by the time they graduate. Next, he talks about how natural it is for young people to rebel. But today, with so many things to rebel against, where should thoughtful young rebels focus their efforts? If the church is to improve, he says, the laity rather than the clergy must take leadership – and he explains why. In the face of this great need, both on the part of the church and of the larger world, college students are called to respond, if they will accept the challenge.

Over the next few posts, I’ll go back over these points in more detail.

First, then: Why should college students pay attention to religion?

Because “the religious instinct is the oldest recorded interest and hope of mankind – coeval, so far as we can discover, with humanity’s earliest strivings…”

Because “this religious instinct is inseparably linked with human history, as far back as that history runs, and furnishing the chief clue to the achievements of those prehistoric folk whose aspirations may only be guessed at.”

Because “this religious instinct was directly responsible for most of the great migrations which have developed and civilized the world; and for most of the wars which, from time to time, have reset the stage and revised the plot and recast the players of the age-old terrestrial drama.”

Because “any education which fails to comprehend the importance of religion to the mental, spiritual, and physical evolution of the race is sadly deficient…”

He says “there are at least two mental types who fail to appreciate this fact…. Strangely enough, these types are utterly antagonistic to each other, at deadly enmity, holding each other in abhorrence; yet, by circuitous routes contriving to arrive at a common destination where their surprise at meeting is doubtless mutual.

“One is the blatant scoffer, who hoots at all religion as the shameful legacy bequeathed by a long line of superstitious forebears. And the other is the mole-eyed bigot whose sacred books and sacred creed and sacred symbols are the only authoritative manifestation of God to the human race.”

Douglas says that, of the two, it is probably the religious bigot who has “achieved the larger results in making shipwreck of their neighbors’ feeble faith.” People tend to be turned away from the faith most consistently by those who, “with rack and wheel and fagot-fire,” with “denunciation and the selfishness of bigotry, have maintained that their peculiar sects enjoyed a monopoly of religious truth, and that all who differed were without remedy or recourse in a sinful world.”

It is against such displays of narrow-mindedness that college students typically turn away in disgust, Douglas says. But more than that, it is perfectly natural for young people to rebel. It’s part of being young. It’s actually a good thing. It’s what keeps the human race moving forward. And it is that very rebelliousness that the church stands in desperate need of, he says. I’ll explain why in my next post.

Thank You, Frieda Diekhoff

by Ronald R Johnson

The title page of “The Religion of a Collegian,” Sermons [4], Box 3, Lloyd C. Douglas Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. © University of Michigan.

Lloyd Douglas’s daughters were not the only ones who donated items to the Bentley Library’s “Lloyd C. Douglas Papers.” Private contributors also donated files. One valuable donation was a collection of sermons that Douglas preached at the First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor during the 1919-1920 school year. He always typed his sermons in advance and made copies available upon request. In the upper left corner of the first two sermons is the name of the donor, who must have collected them at the time and saved them. Her name was Frieda Diekhoff.

I assume this is Mrs. Frieda Sophie Diekhoff Attwood, who was “a lifelong resident of Ann Arbor.” She was awarded a bachelors degree from the University of Michigan in 1924 and a masters in 1927, although her obituary does not say what field she studied. Also in 1927, she married Stephen S. Attwood, who “later became Dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Michigan.” (I’m quoting from her obituary on the “Find A Grave” website.)

When Douglas’s daughters established the “Lloyd C. Douglas Papers” at the university’s Bentley Historical Library in the 1950s, I am sure this was announced in university press releases. As the wife of a dean, Mrs. Attwood probably heard about the archive and realized her sermon collection would be a valuable addition to the set.

What makes this file so valuable is that it allows us to see Douglas at work, week after week, for almost an entire school year. I have found it particularly useful in understanding the evolution of his thought during a pivotal moment in his life, for 1920 was the year in which he became a frequent contributor to the Christian Century and had his first book published (Wanted: A Congregation).

The Fall 1919 part of the collection is filed as “Sermons [4],” and the Winter/Spring 1920 part is called, “Sermons [5].” They are found in Box 3, Lloyd C. Douglas Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.

Here is a list of the sermons in this collection:

*The Religion of a Collegian (Oct 12, 1919)
*The Conservation of Moral Leadership (Oct 19, 1919)
*The Pearl-Trader (Oct 26, 1919)
*Human Engineering (Nov 2, 1919)
*Buried Treasure (Nov 9, 1919)
*Understudies (Nov 16, 1919)
*The Grounds of Our Gratitude (Nov 23, 1919)
*Walled Towns (Nov 30, 1919)
*What Do You Want for Christmas? (Dec 14, 1919)
*Sermon (Jan 4, 1920)
*Personality: First Phase (Jan 18, 1920)
*Personality: Second Phase (Jan 25, 1920)
*Personality: Third Phase (Feb 1, 1920)
*The Wilderness (Feb 15, 1920)
*The Father of Our Country (Feb 22, 1920)
*Art Thou a King, Then? (Palm Sunday, Mar 28, 1920)

Over the next several weeks, I will summarize and quote from these sermons, in the order in which they were preached. Along the way, I will offer my own interpretations, especially in light of his overall development as a thinker and writer. I am excited to work with such a great resource. It is somewhat like a time capsule, giving us glimpses of Douglas’s preaching and thinking over a sustained period. I am grateful that young Ms. Diekhoff saved these pages, and that, years later, she was willing to give them to the university for the benefit of future generations.